The Wall

I burn out so quickly in WoW. I may be back at that wall again. My one team is at 80 and, as is the case for everyone, a whole new grind presents itself ahead of me. Why is it a grind and not just the fun of playing the game? Well, it is. But I've seen all the dungeons now. I've been to all the areas. No, not Naxx yet, but I'm trying, I'm trying. I don't feel like leveling up any of the lower teams today (or this last week, for that matter) either.

But, I don't think it's a long term slump. I'm looking at these ill spots to move to in the RL, and have become mildly obsessed with work again (in a good way, i.e. by choice), but when you're multiboxing, I think you might be quicker to pull the plug on 5 accounts where you might leave 1 account active for months after you've moved on to other entertainments.

I took up inscription and jewelcrafting on my MT, am 3 days from getting team 80 their epic weapons from the argent tournament, and got my first arena points last week. Oh, that might have had something to do with it... arena was a real quick in the balls. And the teeth. And the wallet. A lot of kicks landed. My teammate and I charged out and SPAGHETT!... we were spooked.

Pics and actual content to come. I'm going to post my current boxing-friendly daily quest route for icewind next. Hope you're having a blast.

The C-team RISES!

ooooooh snap! I brought out the c-team today. I guess I'm just an alt-junky. Yesterday, I gave some love to the 80s and finished off a good chunk of Icecrown. I haven't touched the b-team for a few days. I just don't feel like doing the beginning of Northrend again so soon. And this game is all about having fun so I don't sweat it: I just wander off and do whatever strikes me as entertaining at the time.

So, I got the c-team (DK tank, Resto Shaman, Ele Shaman, Frost Mage, and BM Hunter) together. Their armor was entirely red which reminded me that I'd quit playing them because they'd failed so completely and miserably against Nazan (I think). But I fixed them, started questing, and quickly discovered that, like all my teams, this one is fucking good. By the end of the day, they ranged between 62-64, cleared Slave Pens, and were rolling through Underbog before I realized I was about to burn my ragu (which is such a sick recipe.. like an epic drop of a fucking ragu recipe).

I was looking over my 10-man team. I want to get the c-team up to 70 so I can really take a perfect team to 80 (I'm not sure the b-team is perfect.. I might sub out a mage for a shaman or a hunter for a balance druid). After that, I'd guess in a few weeks, I will have 8-10 80s and will really have to put my money where my mouth is. Should I just keep a nimble team of 5 and group up with a pug for 10-man content or should I bite the bullet, get 5 more accounts, and see where this demon lies?

I think we all know how this is going to end.

A Quick To-Do List

More as my own personal collection of vids I want to get back to, while the servers are down, I'm going to post a few reminders...

Argent Tournament Boxing

Wow... I could teach my cat to open her own cans of food with more success than I had trying to get five toons to shield-break and charge a motionless target. In fact, to illustrate my initial attempts to box the jousting quests, here's a quick anecdote:

For the first-level jousting quests, you have to go around whacking away at a bunch of motionless wooden dummies, five days in a row. One of the tasks involves shield breaking and then charging a target which, as it so happens, is situated along the cliff face of Icecrown. I'm used to my mount coming to a slow trot after blasting through these. Hilariously enough, when I sent all five of my toons rocketing toward said cliff-hanging target, one decided it was all too much and just kept on trucking right over the edge. I have no idea why he didn't stop. Sometimes I feel the same way.

Anyway, it was a bit of a mess, all in all. I couldn't share targets via any assist macros, so I had to manually choose the same target on each little screen. I remapped the keys so they were all the same and tried to line everyone up on top of each other like a clown car and steer manually, with some success. I don't know. If anyone has a link or suggestions as to how the fuck I can up my mounted game, I'd appreciate it. I'm going to do some research while the servers are down tomorrow and see if I can get this locked down. I'll post any tips I find of course.

Jousting in the new 5-man (PTR)

Here's a vid of the instanced-jousting we're going to have to do in the next patch. I'm going to wander over to the Argent Tournament (which I pretty solidly hate) and see how hard it is to box the quests. I've tried before and it wasn't pretty but I didn't feel the need to improve.

Opening the Dark Portal for old time's sake

I've been questing in Howling Fjord but I hit that multiboxer-wall where I only had drop quests and was getting a little burnt out. So, just for kicks, I decided to wander back to CoT and do BM. The experience wasn't great, of course. I was hoping it would be but I only did 4% of a level I think. But it was good practice with my new keys and fun as hell. Of course, I'm probably overgeared for it, with a few northrend greens already, and I wasn't on heroic (no rep yet), so I really have no excuse if I can't do this place.

But it did take me back... I love visiting old instance. They always remind me of other people. When my guild of 4 started doing lvl 70 instances back in early BC days, we always had to pick up a 5th. We befriended these two guys, bosaloco and gargoth, and one of them always rolled with us. They were pros, real nice, and just easy going. According to the armory, neither has leveled those particular toons past 70 so I guess they quit like all of us do at some point. But waltzing in to BM just now reminded me of some good fuckin times with the guildies and those two. Hope you guys are doing well.

Macro changes and tomfoolery

I've been working off and on today on my setup. I realized that I initially designed my work-flow to be as simple as possible. During a fight, everyone does the rotation they should generally be doing when I press F, for example. But there are some amazing situational spells that I never use at all. As my team levels higher and higher, dinging 70 yesterday, these spells become more potent and the cost of ignoring them more limiting.

So I've gone and redesigned things. I'm using keyclone and I've never been sure about passing alt modifiers through it, or ctrl ones, for that matter. I generally use separate keys for everything. I think I've figured out at least a bit of why the modifiers have given me problems so far though. If I use shift-w as sheep on my mage and shift-w is unbound on all my other toons, I didn't realize that they will all use W and step forward... So I'm still pretty spread out but I now have access to sheep, fear, judgement, stuns, counterspell, lay on hands and a few other utility spells. Once I memorize them, it should give me a lot more flexibility to handle big pulls and survive cluster fucks.

Flipping like a coin toss

Today was a bit of a let down again. Maybe I'm pushing these guys too hard. I love how I think of them as sort of pets or plants that I'm cultivating... Anyway, I swapped my pally to tank and druid to healer and quested a bit. My pally's sword skill was around 200 so he was air-balling all over the place. My druid dropped 100g on greens and glyphs and was a modest healer. I swapped all my macros around, got the dps assisting the pally, got the druid on follow, all that house keeping that takes a minute. After all was said and done, I had some sloppy resemblance of my former team.

My brother came online and I asked him to tank UK for me. I dumped my pally, made my macros flexible enough to control the group from the druid as healer, and walked in with his 71 DK. Mana was a huge problem. When you walked in to BC, every single quest item in Hellfire was essentially an MC upgrade. The same can't be said for the beginning of Northrend. The stuff is good, of course, and the ilevel is a definite improvement, but a ton of the early caster stuff is spirit, stamina, and spell power. My boys ran out of mana real quick and I switched back to some of my BC dungeon blues to try to fix the problem. But really, it was the loss of the pally and BoW that was killing me, I think. Anyway, I either ran out of mana, couldn't heal my brother well enough, or couldn't keep the group up. We dropped the first boss but the second two guys basically two-shotted my druid healer and ended the fit each time. I was discouraged, to say the least. They were still 68s but whatever. I know my old guildies and I would have rolled through that.

And something just didn't feel right. My druid is a big fucking tauren druid. A monster. I even named him theboss. Like a boss, god damn it! He can't stand in the back throwing stupid hots all over the place and doing fruity things called Lifebloom and playing with seeds. So, just as quickly, I swapped everything back the way it was, for another 100g for each, and I feel better already.

Which leaves me with my original problems. I think I'm going to solve the group healing struggle by placing macros for flash of light on the keypad 1-5, for each toon individually. That might speed things up just enough for me, eliminating the party-click and assist-heal macro that I currently use. Maybe it won't be an upgrade but I'm fucking trying it. I gotta try something. I gotta make it happen.

As for picking up group aggro with my big bear butt... well, my bro's main is a raid-level druid tank and he has no problem with it. So, I just need to L2P in a serious way. It's all about rage management for me. I'll figure it out. I need to be a little more patient.

Lastly, my original vanilla main is an alliance warrior. I haven't played alliance side with anyone else in almost 3 years. We went horde together and never went back. Should I bring my boy over to the dark side when I have the chance with faction-swapping? He will cease to be my guy... the guy that starred in such horrible short films as the Padfoot and Condi series... the guy that was honored in the WotLK trailer (and no, that's not a joke, and Condi and I are still tickled pink about it)... the guy that kept pulling aggro off the main tank in my first MC run because I didn't understand why the MT wouldn't want to share damage...

If I bring him over to the horde he'll just be another alt. I don't think I can do it.

I might be a quitter

The b-team made it to Northrend today and, after doing a few of the earliest quests, I thought, screw it, let's get in to Utgarde Keep and see what this is all about. Well, a few wipes later and I threw in the towel and swapped my druid and pally.

They honestly have kind of sick gear for their levels. I'd gemmed, enchanted, and glyphed them out, and they were doing some impressive stuff (2-man'ing a boss when the rest of the team died early). But, I've run a pally tank before and it's easier than apple pie. And a tree can probably heal just fine. It won't fix my aoe-healing issues necessarily, but who cares. When a bunch of fucking skeletons spawn, they'll run over a big yellow circle of holiness and stick to me like a stalker. There are a lot of macros to re-write or create (since you don't really have many for the toon you play), and I'm sure the first time I test-drive this lemon it won't be pretty. But, in the long run, the team will achieve more effortlessly, I hope.

Sethekk Halls Run - B team

I ran Durnholde Hold and Sethekk Halls with the 66 crew. Here's the webstats report for the Sethekk Run. I actually couldn't drop the last guy. It's easy to reset that fight by just running down the hallway a bit, and having a druid tank means that it was trivial to try the fight multiple times but I just couldn't drop him. Here were my biggest problems:

• My pally fucking sucks at group healing. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. I have him glyphed for Holy Light but that doesn't cut it nearly enough when some boss arcane explodes for 5k. I'm not sure what to do but I'll have to look into it. Priests are amazing healers for boxing and, so far, my favorite. Shammys are clearly competent as hundreds of boxers run with resto shammys without a problem. Druids have the HOTs which make them great for healing on the go, when your group has to keep moving. My pally's mana efficiency is amazing and, as a single target healer, he gets the job done. But group healing has been the death of me many times now.
• I couldn't get out of the way of the explosion fast enough. The closest I got, I had the entire group with me but I spent so much time trying to heal everyone through the Arcane volley thing he casts that I didn't keep the tank topped off enough. If I left the group somewhere, the time it took me to get to them, get them on follow, and get around a pillar was just too much and I'd lose at least 2 of them. I tried to use aspect of the pack right after the boss blinked to me but that didn't work either. I tried again and again. Now, he is a lvl 69 boss and I was 66-67 at the time, but it was mostly my inability to move precisely.

Finally, I brought in an 80 to kill him real quick. I normally don't do that, but the boss was worth 2 quests for the team and I couldn't just drop that.

On a side note, I'm going to start pvping again soon, arena and bgs, and I found this arena flowchart over on elitist jerks pretty funny.

I'm heavily debating going straight to Northrend at 68 or trying all the BC instances at least once and probably heading out there at 70-71 instead. Having just taken a 4-man team up through Northrend, I know the leveling-spree you go on prior to it comes to a sudden and painful halt. And, honestly, the BC instances are a lot fresher to me at this point than the beginning areas of WotLK.

The teams as they stand now

Here's the armory links for my current teams:

The OGs:

Märiachi - Holy Priest

Prongs - Ele Shaman

Harmonica - Tanking DK

Se - Combat Rogue

The promising newcomers:

Mòrt - Holy Pally

Autopîlot - Demo Lock

Orangejulius - Frost Mage

Chänce - BM Hunter

Thebôss - Tanking Druid

The bad news bears:

Bobaduurr - Tanking Dk

Mcnästy - Arcane Mage

Vuh - Survival Hunter

Cälvin - Resto Shaman

Hòbbs - Ele Shaman

The OGs usually either 4-man instances or run with my only 2 friends who still play, zatanta or coralîne.

The promising new crew is doing solidly. So far, only Nexus-Prince Shaffar in Mana-Tombs wiped them out.. but to be fair, I ran out of patience and soulstones and sort of called it a night. They were 64 when they tackled him and I think if I'd tried a few more times, he would have fallen eventually. Also, this is the only crew that's dropped Nazan on their first attempt at 60. All my other crews have fallen to the flame breath.

Actually, this reminds me of a side-note I meant to mention: if you RAF at warp speed like I did, you end up with a bunch of guys that look like this. That's one of my alliance druids that I RAF'd up. After a while, I didn't even loot bosses... I just dinged and moved on. So, everyone walks out into the outlands in their birthday suits. And it is fucking difficult to drop Nazan buck nekkid. But this crew did it. Respect.

The bad news bears, on the other hand, are like the WNBA of my WoW adventures. They just suck and I constantly wonder why I don't just go back to enjoying the best. They fail where all other's (including my alliance team, which I'll post once I get them into my new alliance-side guild) have succeeded. I want them to pull through but they gotta show me something. First, healing with the shaman isn't going great. Since they moved the threat generated by the rock shield to the healer (which was a bit of a shock for me... last time I healed as a shaman, this was just free, threatless healing at its best), I'm hesitant to use it pre-fight like I used to. I guess I should rotate it into my mid-battle healing. Also, his heals are just slow and small... I tried switching to a spam of lesser heals and riptide but it didn't look like it was going to end well.

Other than that, I don't know why they suck. They're in their best-in-slot starter gear but that's no excuse.. my other teams have been fine.

Anyway, there's the horde roster. The ultimate goal is two-fold: to get a 5 man team that includes the OGs, minus the rogue and plus 2 ranged DPS. And to have 10 total 80s for a potential, possible, maybe 10-man raid team. I won't RAF again, I'll just move the toons around. I know, it's pricey. But time is money, friend.

My Layout

Just a last latenight comment: I took a shot with my layout up just so you could see it if you were interested. I'll list the major UI stuff in the morning. Take care.

A Quick Druid Comment

I've been having a weird issue with aggro running the b-team. If I accidentally pally pull a group, they will rush my mage. No one has done a thing yet and he's not the lowest level on the team. I just can't figure it out.

But I'm having less difficulty tanking with the druid. I just have to let aggro build a little more than with other tanks, which in turn gets me the early rage I need for my swipe-fest. But my god a druid can take a beating like no other. The first boss in the crypts was a bitch because I needed to do so much individual moving of the team when his 'gaze' turned on one of them. But then I just let everyone die except the tank and healer and calmly dropped the boss. What a tank. Just awesome.

He also dropped the upgraded lightforge headpiece for my pally, who is really coming together. I think he's gotten every drop he could, so far.

With the team at 66, so close to 67, I can't decide if I should quest in blade's edge or just do a few more runs.

In unrelated news, I started Breaking Bad and I haven't loved a show this quickly since the wire or arrested development. Actually, sometimes it seems like a combo of those two.

The B-team

The rogue that rolls in my lvl 80 team is more like a pet than a 4th toon. He puts out a little more dps in his current gear/macros than the barov peasant caller. I know it's entirely my fault but I just don't care. He occassionally stuns, occassionally comes up big, mostly takes damage I don't feel like healing or runs off to aggro another group mid-boss battle. So, i'm leveling up some ranged dps to take his place and that 5th slot. Without further ado, the B-team:

These guys are really growing on me. The group make up is a druid tank, pally healer, mage, lock, and hunter. Good gear distribution, decent dps numbers (I'll put up their next wws report for any curious), and some decent flexibility. I could easily switch the pally and druid's roles but that's what my alliance side team is and I wanted something different for these guys. They're 66 right now and just plowed through Auchenai Crypts with probably 4-5 wipes. Every time I enter an instance, I like to go in cold. It's been eons since I've run these BC dungeons and I wasn't tanking, so I really don't know most of the encounters at all, let alone the fact that these fuckers are going to mind control my druid and consequently break all my macros. My cleanse macro is:

/assist [target=thebôss, exists, nodead]

/cast Cleanse

or something like that.. from memory. Anyway, I'm surprised that targeting breaks when I get MC'd. It doesn't have [harm] or any condition like that in it. But I simplified it down for now to just be /target thebôss; /cast Cleanse, and that fixed things temporarily.

Will post more later, going to the grove to read in the sun a bit. Take care.

My Setup

Hello, all

Yes, it's the new WoW fad: multiboxing. I happen to decide to try it out because I moved to a time-zone that makes it tough for my friends and I to play together. I've also always played with a very small group of 3-4 players and wanted to see if I could give us the chance to see the 10-man content. A few months later, and I've got 5 accounts, 4 80s, and about 15-20 65s. Here's a quick recap:

I used the RAF option blizzard offers and daisy chained accounts. So, account A invites account B, account B invites account C, etc. There are many benefits for doing things this way.

• First, you can chain summon the whole group to one spot if you get either the first or last toon there. If you had one account invite the other four, you'd only have one summon every hour (i.e. your first account could summon one of the other four and then would be on cooldown, I think... I may be wrong about this so someone can correct me if I am).
• Second, you can chain level-grant. If you can the fifth account to 60, that toon has 30 levels to grant the fourth account that invited it. Those 30 levels count as levels gained, so that toon now has 15 levels it can grant the third account. It cascades down to the point where my first account had so many free 60s, I moved some of them to the fifth (the only account which never benefits from level-granting, obviously).
• Third, every account gets the free mount this way, each get the free month (excluding the last in the chain, of course), and you only have to have any two of the accounts playing together to get the RAF bonus. So, if your main 80 booster is on the first account, you can have two level 30s from accounts D and E with him/her and get the bonus. If you invite all accounts from you first, you always have to have a +/- 5 level toon from the first with the rest to incur the bonus.

After setting the accounts up, I read everything relevant over at dual-boxing.com. Starter guides, macro help, software tools, UI suggestions, group composition, you name it. I'm using keyclone's maximizer feature to run five windows on one 24-inch monitor. Whenever I try to place any of the instances on either of my other two monitors, my framerates tank. I'm sure it's user-error but things work well enough that I haven't tried fixing/improving that yet. Here's a small list of starting pointers that were key for me:

• Use a DK or pally tank. My main is a warrior and I've tanked as a druid and for boxing purposes, consecration and death and decay are irreplaceable for picking up newly spanned adds that have no aggro built on them. Sure, you can swipe, you can thunderclap, but I'm telling you, I have mana or runes on cooldown always, but I don't always have rage (especially early, when I'm just gearing up).
• Keep things simple. I have 3-4 buttons I use every fight and that's it. I have an assist macro so my team takes my target, a DPS macro which is the same key as my tanking macro (my spam button for most of the fight), a healing button, and a freak-out button (everyone blows their cooldowns, trinkets, etc). That's it. Now, two things to point out: first, I'm not very good at this. So, don't take any of this as Gospel. These are just my thoughts and experiences so far. Second, I do have macros and keys for totems, targeted cleansing, CC, group healing, mounting, drinking, following, spreading out, AOE, and panic moments. I also have dance and vanity pet keys. I just add them as I go along. But my main combat is very simple and so far has been effective. Case in point, I have a completely ungeared group of 4, mixed 79s and 80s, and I rolled through the first two bosses of UP normal last night. Not a breath taking achievement, I know, but 4-manning an instance above me seems like I'm not totally underachieving.
• Use the Click-to-Move and Interact with target one-two punch for quest-taking and that sort of thing. Look it up over at dual-boxing. It's fantastic. In brief, just switch on click-to-move on all your toons under settings, bind the interact-with-target key to something (I use F12, and a separate one for my melee classes, but about that some other time) and then walk up to a quest-giver or flightmaster, have everyone assist you and take your target, then press the interact key. Everyone will open up the dialog with said NPC and Jamba will take care of the rest for group accepting and mirroring of your main.
• Use Jamba. See above. It really does kick ass. Also, once you have Jamba, make the big-button macro that this guy suggests. I love it.
• I love keyclone and I have no problem supporting someone a bit who makes a great product like this. It's $20 for life, works great, the guy who runs it has gotten back to me when I pm him very quickly, and there are a ton of tutorials and support guides for it. There are free alternatives (autohotkey, etc) but when I was reading about software solutions for multiboxing, this one seemed the easiest to work with. I have no experience with the others. Honestly, though.. if you're going to multibox, don't cut corners here. It's a mildly expensive hobby but I dropped more on the steak I'm going to grill tonight for dinner than I did on keyclone which I've already used daily for two months.
• Pick the classes you want to play. I use all mixed teams because I fucking love putting new gear on. I love it so much that doing it five times more in an instance run and never wasting any drop really makes me euphoric. Mixed classes are harder though, as each DPS macro becomes less efficient (my lock macro for non-boss fights is just a shadow bolt spam). You can also take four shaman and a DK and still spread out loot quite well. Here's the thing: a DK and four shaman seem ideal for heroics. Mixed classes seem better if you might push on to do 10-man raid stuff because of the overlapping buffs and increased utility you actually need in them. Everyone says ranged is easier than melee for boxing, and that is true of course but I started with a rogue in my group and it really isn't a big deal. I use the click-to-move action mentioned above to get my rogue on my target and voila. So, in short, do what you want and figure it out later.

There's more, and I'll get to it, but for now, I think I might want to go play some. Here's a kill shot from last night's UP run, btw.

Enjoy your day and talk to you soon. Next post I'll put up armory links to my teams.